


Fate

by ThisIsNotAProfile



Category: Holes - Louis Sachar
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-20
Updated: 2016-10-20
Packaged: 2018-08-23 13:36:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 499
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8329849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThisIsNotAProfile/pseuds/ThisIsNotAProfile
Summary: A study of Katherine "Kissin' Kate" Barlow.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ladyoflorien](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladyoflorien/gifts).



She is an outlaw.

Stories about her spread as far as the railways will take them and sometimes further. Kissin’ Kate Barlow. Only kisses the men she kills. Gold-blonde hair, eyes as blue as the sky above, and a soft southern accent that turns every word into a note, every sentence into a song.

But you will not notice any of that in front of the muzzle of her Single Action Army.

* * *

She is a thief.

She has stolen more than money and lives. She has stolen a place for herself in this world, because the one she had before died with Sam out on the waters of Green Lake. It is no place for what society calls a proper lady, but she is not one of those anymore. She has shot holes in her cage and left it a pile of scrap on the floor as she sets off into the sun.

It is a place that she knows would make her father’s jaw slacken with disbelief, make his brow furrow with worry and make him whisper _oh, Katie…_

But he would not cry for her. She must take solace in that.

* * *

She is a rider.

Sometimes she rides alone, sometimes with a partner, sometimes with a gang. But she spends more time in the saddle than out of it - leather chafing her britches, reins tight in white-knuckled hands, wind whipping at her hair as she spurs her mount on and on through the desert.

There will come a time, the newspapers say, where there will not be any place to ride left. No place for the outlaw to run. Nowhere for the scoundrel to hide from the sheriff’s badge or the hangman’s noose. The cities will become metropolises and swallow the earth whole under them.

She is grateful she will not live to see it.

* * *

She is a wanderer.

It has been a part of her as long as she can remember. Long walks during the summer twilight on her father’s ranch going nowhere in particular, hands outstretched to feel the reeds growing along the riverbank. Watching the water trickle over the stones and pebbles. One day, she picks one up, and it is smooth to the touch from eons of erosion, without a single pit in its face. She tries to skip it across the water, but it sinks on the first hop.

It is a memory she holds on to and relives sometimes as campfires fade to embers and night creeps over the horizon. It is what the French call _l’heure bleue_ \- twilight.

Sometimes she thinks on what she would say to that girl if she had the chance. She toys with words in her head, debating the merits of each one as the sun slips down and past the endless plains of Texas and the red rocks of Arizona and the mountains of Colorado. But it is only when cold overtakes her that she decides that some things are better left to the fates.


End file.
